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Monday, March 13, 2017

Anxious gatekeeping

Analogous to nervous
cluelessness is something we might call “anxious gatekeeping.” This is desire to police the borders of poetry,
or of “good poetry,” or to decide on the direction in which poetry has to go in
the future. It is evident in the anxiety of not knowing what poets of the
present or recent past will pass into the canon. (Not surprisingly, Harold
Bloom, a proponent of theories of anxiety, is also the classical case of the
anxious gatekeeper, eager to establish the eternal validity of his own
judgments.) There are limits, of course, to what we can imagine calling poetry. But those are the limits of our
own imagination, not of poetry itself, and we cannot know in advance where they
might lie, and how they might shift for future generations. An eighteenth
century poet like Alexander Pope would not have accepted most twentieth and
twenty-first century poetry, and might have had problems even with Wordworth
and Coleridge.

We can follow
Matthew Arnold, and insist on the value of touchstones,
privileged examples of “the best of what has been thought and said,” without committing
ourselves to Arnold’s own canon, or that of Pope, Bloom, or anyone else. In
reality, nobody has the power to enforce any personal set of preferences, or
impose them on others, except through the coercion of institutional power. The
anxiety of gatekeeping is kept alive precisely because not even the gatekeepers
can come to any agreement among themselves, let alone force their preferences
on anyone else.